Just before none of expected, Ransomware hit America’s most popular ‘no-right-turn’ racing format, NASCAR. The vicious act took place in April this year. Apparently, it was an attack by TeslaCrypt Ransomware, which has been defunct lately .
The team came to know about the suspicious activities when Dave Winston, crew chief of Circle Sport-Levine Family Racing, received a call from the team engineer. Some unusual communication came in his notice between Winston’s computer and their Dropbox account. Perhaps this made him check what’s going on.
Ransomware is not unfamiliar to most of us. And we all know how quick is the malicious malware with locking out the files and system of users’. This was again seen in the case of Winston.
Winston immediately took his system offline. As soon as he opened one of the files, it popped up a message that all files have been encrypted. To cross check, he opened another one and yet another one, but his computer screen shown the same message.
On this CATTY EVENT Winston said, “Just knowing that we could lose everything that we had worked so hard to achieve was terrifying. The data that they were threatening to take from us was priceless, we couldn’t go one day without it greatly impacting the team’s future success. This was a completely foreign experience for all of us, and we had no idea what to do. What we did know was that if we didn’t get the files back, we would lose years’ worth of work valued at millions of dollars.”
What happened next…
The team put in its efforts to understand and get back their files. But since Ransomware has got a strong encryption, all their efforts went in vain. Perhaps, they couldn’t recover their files. This made them come to the decision of paying off the ransom, cyber criminals had demanded.
The NASCAR team paid the ransom worth $500 via an anonymous medium using bitcoin. After this, the decryption key was sent to them, which helped them decrypt their files next morning. However, the team was still concerned about the infections that might still sneaking over their computers and perhaps network.
NASCAR team sought for help from security firm Malwarebytes on this. With a survey, Malwarebytes found Ransomware on more of their computers. Nevertheless, the security firm helped them have a safe and clean network.
How to protect against Ransomware?
The makers of TeslaCrypt Ransomware lately released decryption key universally. Henceforth, there isn’t any harm from this Ransomware. But the threats of the other similar malware programs are proliferating. Every now and then, a NEW KIND of Ransomware is seen with improved and stronger ways of encryption. This compels the need for precautions against the malicious program.
The safest way to protect files from Ransomware is to create a backup of all files. This task can be perform using a nifty app- Right Backup. Right Backup is an app which help you store all data on cloud in a jiffy. With Right Backup you can access your files from anywhere, at any time. Other than this, the app also has an automatic schedule feature to backup all your files at the scheduled hour.